Stop the Workslop: How to Cut Through AI Content Noise

In a market where 35% of new websites are AI-generated and one-third of customers will walk away the moment they smell automation, how does anyone get heard anymore?

That’s the question I left with after a livestream appearance this past week. I'd just spent time on the Magic School Pod hosted by the wonderful Mary Signorelli talking about empathetic leadership.

I had a delightful time. But I kept thinking afterwards: does any of this posting still matter?

HBR's BetterUp Labs and Stanford researchers have coined a term for it: "workslop." Polished-looking AI output that offloads cognitive work onto whoever has to read it. It's everywhere. And legit efforts (like Mary's) are getting drowned out by it.

The Noise Is Real (Here's the Data)

DataReportal logs ~7.8 new social media user accounts created every second. Sprout Social found short-form video alone now accounts for ~43% of all social content consumed, with TikTok, Reels, and Shorts producing more than 120 billion daily views combined. Remember when newsletters or email was considered a dying medium? Well, Substack increased its subscribers by 3 million between 2023 and 2025 and email users passed 4.7 billion in 2026. Established creators benefit from algorithmic bias, while newer writers reported subscriber growth dropping 80 to 90% in 2025.

Do you wonder, as I do, if AI is making this worse? Well, the data shows it clearly is. A joint study from Stanford, Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive analyzed 33 months of website data and found that by mid-2025, 35% of new websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted. That's up from nearly zero before ChatGPT launched in November 2022. This explosion is eroding consumer trust. Adobe's 2026 AI and Digital Trends research found one-third of customers would disengage from a brand the moment they discovered its content was AI-generated. And 37% would walk away when they realized they'd been interacting with AI while expecting a human.

So there's more content. Most of it is AI-created. It's happening across every platform. People can't tell what's what, and they're exhausted even trying. So how do you go about breaking through the slop?

A lot of what gets published today is AI-generated. Most of what gets remembered isn't.

After two decades leading operations, customer success, and healthcare transformation, plus years of testing in the AI era, I've landed on four principles.

Four Principles for Being Heard in 2026

1.   Get Back to Grassroots

It takes longer and requires a dogged consistency, but creating meetup groups or in-person forums where you're shaking hands, making connections, and fostering a network pays off tenfold compared to constantly pounding the internet with content. Eighty percent of marketers identify in-person events as the most trusted marketing channel, and gatherings of under 150 people are growing 34% year-over-year. Coming out of my Johns Hopkins AI in Healthcare work, I've watched this play out. The big-bang annual conferences aren't going anywhere. Providers, payers, and vendors will still show up (and most attendees will still spend more time getting toasted than toasting actual innovation). But the leaders genuinely trying to incorporate AI and drive change are doing something different in parallel. They're building smaller communities with entrepreneurs and patient groups, where the conversations actually translate into better outcomes. No algorithm or automation will top that, and healthcare needs it.

2.   Play Depth Score

SaaS founders, healthcare leaders, and tech executives: your brand DNA is now measured by dwell time, comment depth, saves, and private shares. While "mastering" algorithms and social channels may feel overwhelming, social media remains the broadest area of reach and where you have the best opportunity to get the largest audience. Understanding the tools, following best practices, and putting yourself out there is the work. The average B2B buyer journey now runs 272 days with 88 touchpoints across four channels. Events aren't likely to close alone. They create the moments that matter, but you'll need digital to keep doing the persistent work between handshakes.

3.   Be Authentically You

After two decades leading teams across the front lines, customer success, and now AI in healthcare, I've learned the people who win the trust game are the ones who refuse to outsource their voice. The data backs it. Sprout Social's 2026 research ranks human-generated content as the #1 priority for users, and an April 2025 LinkedIn and Ipsos survey found authenticity and credibility are the top criteria for selecting B2B creators.

AI will try to emulate you. "Visionaries" have proven you can be cloned. But at the end of the day, people are choosing to work with you. The good and the bad. Be that human, be yourself.

4.   Give Before Get

When I first jumped into consulting in 2020, a mentor taught me the rule of five: give five gifts (an introduction, an insight, a referral, a piece of advice) before expecting one in return. It's a heuristic, not a published study. But it's also a mantra I run by every week.

For Customer Success and RevOps leaders, this maps directly to expansion motion: five touchpoints of value before the expansion conversation. The buyers haven't changed. The noise has. And the research backs the principle: educational content drives 3x more leads than promotional content.

Not everything you say must be groundbreaking. But it should matter to someone. So speak with purpose, and when people find you, that will help them listen.

In 2026, the data favors authentic personal voices establishing themselves as experts in a clear niche, posting consistently, and creating educational content that teaches something to their target audience. The era of generic content chasing virality isn’t necessarily over, but the channels don’t support it anymore.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

AI has made it exponentially easier to produce content and overwhelm the people we're trying to reach. Here's the operating system I run with the leaders I work with, regardless of vertical:

1. Discover what makes you distinctive. Generic doesn't get saved or shared. Specific does. What's the one thing only you can say?

2. Build a story around one character and one tension. Neuroscience research (Paul Zak at Claremont Graduate University) shows narrative with a specific person and a specific struggle is what triggers the brain's empathy and trust response. An abstract principle doesn't.

3. Lead with vulnerability. Organization Science research shows leaders who share criticism they've received build measurably stronger psychological safety than leaders who only ask for feedback. The data says lead by going first.

In practice, this looks like building in-person groups around a shared theme, supported by technology that delivers messages that are 100% you and genuinely useful to the people receiving them.

If you're a healthcare, healthtech, SaaS, or Customer Success leader trying to navigate AI adoption without losing trust, culture, or operational clarity (and without becoming part of the slop yourself), this is the work I do with executive teams.

Which of the four are you under-investing in right now? I read every comment.

Ready, set, go!

Adam

Sources

• DataReportal Global Digital Overview (October 2025)

• Stanford, Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive joint study (2025)

• Adobe 2026 AI and Digital Trends (with Oxford Economics)

• Sprout Social 2026 Index

• LinkedIn and Ipsos B2B Creator Survey (April 2025)

• HBR / BetterUp Labs / Stanford "Workslop" research (September 2025)

• Content Marketing Institute 2026 B2B Benchmarks

LLM models were used to support research, grammar, and structural clarity. All thoughts, opinions, lived experiences, and recommendations (for better or worse) are my own.